Page 96 of The Business of Blood
If I were capable, I might have obeyed him.
But what I saw burning in Aidan’s dark eyes—brighter than the heated blade in his hand—planted my feet to the ground across the sanctuary from him.
Devotion. Pure, true, brilliant faith. No anger, wrath, or hatred as one would expect from the perpetrator of such a vicious act.
“Aidan?” My first instinct was to reach for the knife, but logic reminded me of folly. “Aidan, what in God’s name are you doing? You’ll kill him.”
“Yes,” he confirmed clinically. Not with relish or with regret. “Yes, eventually, I will.”
I gaped at him in dumb astonishment before I finally struggled through my outrage. “It’smurder!You can’t atone for murder.” I tried to speak to him in a language he might understand. To bring some semblance of reason back to what my mind didn’t want to process as reality.
Patiently, Aidan returned the knife to a brazier of red and white coals as he addressed me. “This ismyatonement. My sacrifice to the Almighty. It’s what He demands of me. I’m not murdering them, Fiona. I’m martyring them.”
“Go,” Jorah moaned. “Get help. Get the Blade.” He gave a few weak struggles against leather bonds already slick with blood from his wrists and ankles.
The Hammer was not one to give in to such a fate without a fight. That he was so exhausted, revealed just how long he’d been in Aidan’s custody.
Hours. Maybe since he’d left me at Scotland Yard.
“It’s okay, Fi,” Aidan soothed. “You can go. You are safe. I will come to your house and explain everything later.”
I could admit the promise of safety tempted me more than it should.This is Aidan, my heart told me. Steady, brilliant, gentle Aidan. If he planned to kill the Hammer, he must have a good reason.
If he kills the Hammer, a dark voice whispered to me,you’ll be free of the gangster’s illegal demands…
No. I violently rejected the awful temptation. I didn’t listen to that voice. We were all of us alive, and I’d do what I could to keep it that way.
Had tears not already been streaming down my cheeks, the sight of poor Jorah would most certainly have produced a flood of them. His well-hewn body trembled. The multitude of sacred candles half-mooned around the altar glimmered across the sweat slicking his pale skin.
Except for the places he’d been relieved of that flesh. Aidan had stripped the epidermis from part of Jorah’s shoulder to the clavicle and had begun working down toward his chest when I’d interrupted.
Every nerve of mine seized with a strange sympathetic pain. It would not have surprised me to look down to find my flesh burning away, leaving a red, sinewy chasm beneath.
I could not fathom the agony Jorah suffered.
“You cannot believe that this is the will of God. Aidan, what could he possibly have done to deserve this?”
A transformation overtook him, then. Something wicked. Demonic, even. “You know his sins are legion,” he declared in a dark voice I’d never heard from him before. “Not the least of which is daring to touch you with his heathen hands.”
What was he talking about? “He never touched me, Aidan, not in the way you think.”
“You always were a terrible liar, Fiona.” He shook his head like a disappointed parent.
“I’m telling thetruth!”
“You’re saying he didn’t relieve you of your clothing? Your blouse?
“Only to doctor a wound!” I touched the still-healing cut near my clavicle. “Itoldyou that.”
“He didn’t half-carry you to the café today?” he challenged. “He didn’t stroke your cheek and kiss your bare knuckles when he dropped you at Scotland Yard?”
Well…he’d done that. “Have you been watching me, Aidan? Spying on me, your oldest friend?”
“I’ve been watchinghim.” Aidan stabbed a condemning finger at the Hammer. “That I often see you nearby is disturbing happenstance.”
I heard none of this. Or maybe I did, and it refused to register because all I could focus on were the wet, awful sounds of several East End prostitutes as he cut their throats.
“It’syou,” I breathed. It all made sense now. Aidan knew my past. My secrets. He knew me better than anyone. Anyone left alive anyway. He’d been trained as a soldier and then as a surgeon. He’d been in Whitechapel long enough to carefully select his victims and reap this sort of bloody judgment upon them. He’d written me letters before, and his script was as dear as it was familiar.
